Posted tagged ‘blog azeroth’

W00t! As part of the Furtive Father Winter event at Blog Azeroth (hosted by Akabeko, who has done a fantastic job this year), I received a surprise guest post!

My Secret Santa was no other than Saif from Raiding after Dark. Saif’s a fantastic writer (WITH CREDENTIALS!) and he certainly delivered again this time. I got all goosebumpy and teary after reading his lovely story.

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I don’t know crap about Holy.

That was my first thought when I sat down to write this. Fear enveloped me. I hadn’t been writing about and theory-crafting Paladin healing for ages. What could I possibly have to say on one of the most popular and successful blogs in Azeroth?

Then I realized I didn’t know much about Christmas, let alone Winter’s Veil.

The real panic set in.

I thought back to the last few Winter’s Veil celebrations and the holiday has come and gone eliciting only the occasional “Bah-humbug” from me as my guild-mates ran about gathering their achievements, carefully wrapping gifts and sending them to one another. I was the Grinch in the guild, muttering darkly about commercialism and errant
dates and stolen culture. All those Winter’s Veils blended together into a gray blur of kill-joy.

But last year’s Winter’s Veil shines clearly in my memory. Last year was different.

Cataclysm was young and new, we were still struggling with Heroics, trying to gear up to take on Nefarian and I was having a terrible Christmas Eve. My car was broken into, a severe snow-storm was on its way, and near midnight, I finally got home from leaving my car at the garage, cold and tired. My family was all asleep yet I was jittery, so
I logged into WoW, and queued for a dungeon.

Before I could click “Enter”, I heard my son stir in his sleep. He was only 2 months old at the time, and as one does with their first child I suppose, every noise he made compelled me to check in on him. I saw he was awake, but content, blinking in the dim light of the monitor trying to make things out, and so I tried to pat him back to sleep but he was having none of it.

He squirmed and I picked him up, brought him back to my desk with me and he focused his eyes on the only part of the room that was illuminated – the screen. We sat down together, and he continued to stare, mesmerized by the colors.

With one arm occupied by the baby, I was left to wander Stormwind, trying to think of something I could do. As the clocks in Stormwind struck midnight, in the midst of drowsy exhaustion, I thought, “It’s Christmas.” Despite the fact that I don’t celebrate the holiday, nor do I have any childhood associations with it, at that moment, I wanted
to celebrate it with my son.

Running to my bank, I saw the plethora of enchants and cut gems that I had stored up from having leveled up my professions quickly. I took everything I had, stood on the bank steps in the Dwarven District and typed, “/join trade.”

The usual mixture of erratic, chaotic white-text flooded my screen but I began to link the cut gems and enchants, with a “Free! :-)” after them. People stopped by, some skeptically, others offering to buy them off of me, but I gave something to everyone who spoke to me.

I didn’t just want to do dailies or quest on an alt with my son watching. If I was in game at Christmas, I wanted him to see me do something even a tiny, little bit meaningful. That’s what sets Warcraft apart from all other games for me – I have the opportunity to engage with other people, and perhaps improve their experience in a tangible way. It lets you affect positive change, if you are of a mind to do it. And I wanted my son to see me smiling and trading with
people, not blinding clicking Accept Quest/Complete Quest on auto-pilot having no interaction with the people around me.

And for the next half hour or so, I emptied out my bag, and when I was done, I looked back to see my son was asleep.

I carefully walked him over to his crib, laid him down, and went back to run that dungeon after all.

This Winter’s Veil, I finished my Merrymaker title.

Happy Holidays!

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Such a sweet story, I love it!

As for myself, if you were looking for a guest post from me on the participating blogs (right, I’m really THAT delusional ;D ) and couldn’t find one, well, someone did gift an anonymous guest post to Beruthiel. I WONDER WHO WOULD DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT, HMMMM?

It’s stupidly cold outside. I frostbit my fingers digging my car out of a snowbank otherwise knows as my parking lot. It’s dark all the time. I wake up in cold sweats every night, after having nightmares about semester finals of Decembers past.

But it’s ok. It’s all ok.

Because all these things mean that it’s just about that time of year! That time of year, oh yeah, for this year’s edition of Blog Azeroth‘s Christmas event!

I’m not really resigning as a Blog Azeroth mod, but I realized that I can’t keep up with the Shared Topics anymore. And as a whole, we’d love some fresh new faces to help greet new members, encourage blogging events and answer questions. If this sounds like you, head over to this thread at Blog Azeroth (you’ll need to be logged in to see it).

I’d be especially happy if one of the Shared Topics regulars (I’m looking at you Aliera, at you Oathblade, at you Dragonray, at you Amerence, at you rest of you who participate often in Shared Topics – now’s your chance to make sure Topic get queued in a timely fashion and recaps get posted every week!) volunteered for the spot.

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In other news, I have to admit that I have very little motivation in keeping up with this blog. Part of it is my working 60 hours a week, but most of it is that I just don’t want to make the time to update regularly.

Don’t be sad, though, I doubt much will really change here. I’ve been posting once a week or less for well over a year anyway. I’m just making it official. I’ll post when I have something to talk about, but I’m resigning from feeling the need to maintain the blog.

I am feeling the motivation to update my personal (otherwise known as Shrine-to-Myself) blog, so if, for whatever unfathomable reason, you take pleasure in reading me writing about myself, I’m hoping to blow some life into that corner of the internet. I would have done it sooner but each time I have something to write I tell myself: “No! You can’t update that until you update the WoW blog!” Which, most of the time, ends in neither blog being updated.

It seems that my last blogroll update was from January, so about 6 months ago. No, wait, that’s exactly 6 months ago. Or it was yesterday when I started writing this post.

Time flows faster on the internet. Since my last blogroll update date, we’ve had bloggers leave us, we’re have retired bloggers make a return and we’ve had new bloggers introducing themselves. We’ve even had new bloggers to the scene who’ve already retired. That’s how fast time flows on the internet.

Personal links

That’s right, I’m starting with my own links first, egomaniac that I am. Under the paladinning section, I added my non-raid gear post and the Holy Paladin 101 I wrote for Top Rosters. I also tearfully cleared out a few posts that were too outdated to be of any use. That’s the sad side of playing a class that gets revamped every patch: your hard work never lasts long.

Please Welcome Back

After sorting through the Paladin and the Retired folders in my RSS feeder, I discovered that two bloggers have returned from the nether for our reading pleasure.

Ruthra from Holy Shock has also made a comeback, writing about Holy Paladins as well as other topics that cross his mind.

Please Welcome

When three major names from the Protection paladin community, Anafielle, Theck and Meloree, joined together for a blogging project, I thought “this is too good to be true!”. But I was wrong, it was true. And the end result, Sacred Duty is going strong with regular, informative posts on paladin tanking as well as thought-provoking commentaries on tanking in relation to other aspect of the game.

Another new Protection blog (which also has a great magey half) is D/E the Tank with Orv and Nymphy. They’ve got a lot of resources for new and leveling tanks as well as some extra fun for those of the mage persuasion.

On the Holy side of the paladin blogosphere, we’ve got Heavy Wool Bandage written by Glorwynn Lightbraid. Her voice is one of a kind, and she covers the ground that tends to be forgotten by the majority of holy paladin bloggers: healing in low level instances. There’s a lot more than leveling guides though, so take your time and browse through her pages.

Another Holy blog that has made an appearance is the interestingly titled I am McFluffy, he doesn’t update too often, but maybe if we nudge up, we’ll be seeing more of him.

Kallixta’s Notes is a Holy blog that has actually been around for quite some time. She chronicles her adventures through all the sides of Warcraft, from raiding, to leveling, to RPing to farming.

And last, but not least, Word of Glory is written by the lovely Lynesta. She’s another who doesn’t update often, but when she does, her posts are well written, her topics are relevant, her guides are helpful and she’s overall a lovely voice to read.

Got a Paladin blog?

If you know of a paladin blog I’ve missed, let me know! I’ll list all blogs that meet the following criteria:

1) Blog must have at least one regular paladin contributor (they don’t necessarily have to write about paladin-related stuff)
2) Blog must have existed for at least two months, or one month if updated 3 or more times a week.
3) Blog must have been updated within the past month (some exceptions might apply, but they’re really exceptions)

I’m not political when it comes to my paladin blogroll so if you’re not listed, it’s either because I’m a tad out of touch with the current blogosphere, or of oversight due to human error (I know it’s hard to believe, but I do succumb to that on occasion ;D).

EDIT: And here are some more paladin-flavored blogs for your reading pleasure!

In the tanking department we’ve got Sheep the Diamond by Stubborn who doesn’t write about tanking much, but when you stop by his blog, I can guarantee that you’ll find pages and pages of insightful, thought-provoking posts.

In the healing corner, we’ve got Gina’s Healbot.net, which I swear I have no idea how I missed her blog. (I mean, we’d even chatted on twitter a couple of times! Clearly I’m in the clouds these days.) Each one of her guides (and she’s written a lot of them!) is perfectly planned out and incredibly easy to follow. Head to Healbot.net for paladin and priest healing guides, fantastic 10 man boss guides and discussions on healing.

Welcome to part 3, the final (yay!) part of my compiling and know-it-all-ingly answering of some really common WoW blogging questions.

If you can’t find your question here, check out part 1 and part 2 for the earlier installments of this scarily long WoW blogging FAQ.

Questions on how to get comments and how to build a good relationship with readers are those that seem to come up the most (since, for most of us, interacting with readers is what makes blogging so addictive), so they’re getting their own dedicated post.

I also feel the need to mention that while most Laws of Blogging are pretty universal, I’m writing with a focus on the WoW blogging community. Each blogging circle has a culture of its own and our local customs might not necessarily be applicable to the blogging world at large.

In Part 1, I said this FAQ would be divided into two parts because I was too chatty. I was wrong. Because I’m that chatty, this FAQ will actually be divided into three parts: the basics, content and building your community.

So here is part 2, with my (personal, selfish) answers to the most common questions I notice and receive on blog content.

I’m interrupting the gift series with a very special post. See, in the spirit of Love Is In The Air, Dristanel from The Physician’s Log came up with a fantastic Blog Azeroth event! All of us participating make a post like this one and we each get our very own secret admirer.

And I get to blogstalk someone else…as if I didn’t do it enough already!

I’m very excited about this! I’ve never had a secret admirer before! No, that guy who sat in front of me in the fourth grade and stole my pencils when I wasn’t looking doesn’t count.

If you want to see other bloggers’ secret admirers, head over to The Physician’s Lodge to read the kickstart post!